Top 5 WordPress CMS Alternatives to Choose In 2022
There are a tonne of alternatives out there. Actually, I just went and Googled “WordPress alternatives,” and it came back with 101,000,000 search results.
So to list them all here would be impossible as the CMS market is huge today and there’s one that fits almost any niche by now.
To find a good alternative for you, it comes down to your experience and skills (if you’re a developer or not), what you need it for (ecommerce, heavy integrations or something simple), and who’s primarily going to be working with it (developers, marketers, or editors).
Depending on those three very simplified factors, you’ll be able to find a good WordPress alternative.
WordPress powers a considerable portion of the web and will for a long time. But there are good alternatives to WordPress, and in this blog, let’s discuss the five that we think are best. These five each have their unique differences.
WordPress will make your list if you’ve been looking for options to build your website. After all, it’s one of the most popular content management system (CMS) options. But if you have specific site requirements and this open-source platform doesn’t fit the bill, there are WordPress alternatives that may better suit your needs.
I’ve built websites with all of them. I will try my best to find the tool that best fits the task, and I encourage you to do the same. If you can, you can find a link to all five tools.
Best WordPress CMS alternatives to pick in 2022
Webnexs Headless
So the first WordPress alternative is Webnexs headless. Webnexs headless is a website builder, and with website builders, everything is included out of the box. So, for example, Webnexs headless provides you with themes and plugins. This means no more searching for a working WordPress photo gallery plugin. Webnexs headless already has an excellent one out of the box. This also means Webnexs headless isn’t as customizable. For example, unlike WordPress, Webnexs headless doesn’t have hundreds of different photo gallery plugins.
Now you can only host Webnexs headless websites on Webnexs headless servers. The upside is that you don’t even have to think about hosting.
Webnexs headless takes care of that overall. Webnexs headless is a lot easier to use than WordPress. It’s like the Apple of website builders. It’s intuitive and thoughtful and also like an apple. Webnexs headless has great taste.
They’re known for their excellent templates that often have a recognizable look and feel with bold typography, white space, and room for photos. Beyond all of this, Webnexs headless has great blogging, podcast hosting, e-commerce, and more. If you’re looking for something easier than WordPress, I’d recommend Webnexs headless.
Shopify
Next up is Shopify. I highly recommend Shopify for e-commerce websites. So many other e-commerce builders are confusing and overwhelming, including, in my opinion, WooCommerce, which is WordPress’s e-commerce plugin. Shopify is not confusing and overwhelming.
It’s clear and intuitive to notice how clean and uncluttered Shopify’s product editor feels. Here, the key to Shopify’s being uncluttered is their app store. Shopify’s core covers typical e-commerce features like products and discounts. The app store covers anything more unusual.
For example, gift wrap-up sales and back-in-stock notifications. Of course, gift wrap upsells will only be used by a small fraction of Shopify users. So that’s why you wouldn’t want it included in the core; otherwise, the center would get cluttered fast, which is precisely what happens to other e-commerce website builders.
For example, this is the Volusion product editor. It’s cluttered and confusing right now. I’ve just scratched the surface here. There’s a lot more to Shopify than just this. There’s also Shopify capital for small business loans, Shopify payments for payment processing, and a Shopify fulfillment network where they’re starting to compete with Amazon on fulfillment, which is super exciting. I can’t wait to see what happens there.
Webflow CMS
My next alternative is Webflow. I’m no longer a freelance web designer. However, if I still were, I would think about moving from WordPress to Webflow. The significant innovation with Webflow is their designer tool. It gives you the flexibility of front-end coding without requiring you to know how to code. So you can mock up anything using this editor, which gives you complete freedom.
There’s no template you’re stuck within on top of this designer. Full CCS integration is possible. The CMS lets you create content types made up of fields, for example, plain text, images, dates, colors, and even rich text. Having the designer plus the CMS is something I would have loved to have had when I was a freelance designer. This is powerful. The other great thing is the editor interface. The editor is where your client or your team can edit the website, and as you can see, it’s much more intuitive than WordPress’s (at times) messy back end.
Ghost CMS
Next up is a ghost. The WordPress Ghost is open source, but unlike WordPress, the ghost is explicitly focused on doing one thing: thriving publishing. When WordPress started, they were focused on blogs. But over the years, WordPress has just taken on more and more, and it’s now a vast, fully-fledged CMS. Ghost is purposely trying to avoid this fate by just focusing on publishing. I’ve built a few sites with ghosts.
But I’ve yet to launch any live, I keep returning to Ghost because I know it’ll be perfect when it’s the right fit. It’s got a lot to like; a beautiful writing interface from which you can also send newsletters; a complete membership system. So you can add a paywall and sell subscriptions to your publication, and it’s worth noting that Ghost takes zero percent of your sales, which is impressive considering services like Sub Stack are getting super popular.
So they take 10% more than anything else. I just like that Ghost is clean and focused. Try Ghost if you’re sick of waiting through menus, and complex options on WordPress don’t support this ghost interface. Lower your stress levels like WordPress Ghost can be installed on any host. That being said, ghost pro hosting is offered by the ghost, and it’s probably your best option.
Jamstack CMS
Finally, let’s talk about the jamstack. This last one is more for developers because using the jam stack will require coding. The jamstack isn’t a tool. It’s a whole new category of tool. The jam stack is a new way of building websites that doesn’t use server-side rendering. This leads to better performance, security, and just a better overall developer experience. I know that it all sounds super abstract and boring.
But in practice, it’s anything but a fantastic way of speeding up websites and connecting them to all kinds of new CMS. For example, I rewrote my website site builder report with Jekyll and Netlify CMS. It took my site speed score from 30 to 90, and the netlify CMS were insanely easy to add. It all just worked well.
There’s an explosion of new tools within the jam stack that you can fit together. There are many static site generators like Gatsby, Hugo Jekyll and many more. These can be combined with all kinds of new CMS netlify, CMS contentful sanity, and many more. It’s honestly way too much to cover all these WordPress alternatives.
I hope that was helpful. I’m not trying to be hard on WordPress alternatives, but suitable alternatives exist. It’s not the answer to every website; you should choose the tool that matches what you’re trying to build and which scales.
